I'll never ceased to be amazed by the way in which people instantly and unquestioningly adopt this weird metaphor-heavy language. Today we had some product training from a(nother) huge US corp. Each slide set out some info about a certain product arranged in three horizontal tiers which they referred to as a 'layer cake'.
Now to me that's amusing but within seconds of being presented with this everyone was calling it a layer cake without a hint of irony, and flinging emails round saying "here are the updated cakes".
WTF?
As a linguist I'm not too stuffy about usage. In fact I find it amazing that we have the capacity to use abstract terms like this so willingly.
I'll never ceased to be amazed by the way in which people instantly and unquestioningly adopt this weird metaphor-heavy language. Today we had some product training from a(nother) huge US corp. Each slide set out some info about a certain product arranged in three horizontal tiers which they referred to as a 'layer cake'.
Now to me that's amusing but within seconds of being presented with this everyone was calling it a layer cake without a hint of irony, and flinging emails round saying "here are the updated cakes".
WTF?
As a linguist I'm not too stuffy about usage. In fact I find it amazing that we have the capacity to use abstract terms like this so willingly.